Teaching and learning birth: "help all to know"

This guest editorial explores the idea that our worldview, regardless of education, influences our childbirth practices, sometimes interfering with achieving the goals of our discipline. Over time, we have lost our ability to support women through the process of childbirth so that they emerge as strong, healthy women. The high road ahead is to teach everyone, including ourselves, that we need to provide optimal, evidence-based care. Pursuing this path will take courage and commitment.     

The HBCU Experience: Liberating or Not?

While African American women routinely outnumber African American men on the historically Black college and university (HBCU) campus, the African American woman??s voice is usually relegated to the margins within social and academic frameworks. The author seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the actual liberation of African American women on HBCU campuses. Drawing from undergraduate and graduate experiences as an African American female on campus, the author uses Collins??s (Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge, New York, 2009) Black feminist epistemology as a lens through which to examine her own decision to attend an HBCU while giving specific attention to the implications and intersections of race and gender. Using Black feminist epistemology and autoethnography, the author provides a critical analysis of her education at an HBCU in relationship to the experiences of other African American women. The author concludes the article explaining the intersections of education, liberation, and resistance with implications for HBCU administrators and staff in preparing African American women as campus and community leaders.     

Communicative Competence and the Improvement of University Teaching: Insights from the field

The arguments in this article have been generated from involvement in a government-funded project designed to improve teaching. The authors reflect on their experience and use Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative competence to argue that initiatives designed to improve university teaching often work against their own intentions by closing down opportunities for open dialogue. They argue that improvement of teaching requires undistorted communication and demonstrate that this is made difficult: by the pressure to be seen to succeed; by over-specifying what constitutes good teaching; and, by divorcing research from development. At the same time, they suggest that academics could seize opportunities to open up dialogue about teaching.     

The Relative Predictive Contribution and Causal Role of Phoneme Awareness,Rhyme Awareness,and Verbal Short-Term Memory in Reading Skills: A Review

The acknowledgement that educational achievement is highly dependent on successful reading development has led to extensive research on its underlying factors. A strong argument has been made for a causal relationship between reading and phoneme awareness; similarly, causal relations have been suggested for reading with short-term memory and rhyme awareness alike. Here a meta-analysis is presented that seeks to determine spuriousness in these factors' relationships with reading by examining each factor's unique predictive value. The results show that phoneme awareness is the strongest unique predictor. Since the meta-analysis is based on concurrent data, it is unsuited to enlighten time-order relationships, but longitudinal and experimental studies both support the notion of a causal relationship between phoneme awareness and reading, in contrast to rhyme awareness and verbal short-term memory.     

Students’ Learning Experiences in an Early College High School

Early College High Schools (ECHS) are at the forefront of high school reform embodying the principles of rigor, relationship, and relevance. This study examines students’ learning experiences in the context of relationships and rigor at an ECHS. Specifically, I investigate factors that influence students to attend an ECHS, what they attribute to their academic success, and the challenges they experience. I draw upon data from individual and focus group interviews with students at one 3-year-old ECHS in southeastern North Carolina.     

Parental Socioeconomic Status,Communication, and Children's Vocabulary Development: A Third‐Generation Test of the Family Investment Model

This third‐generation, longitudinal study evaluated a family investment perspective on family socioeconomic status (SES), parental investments in children, and child development. The theoretical framework was tested for first‐generation parents (G1), their children (G2), and the children of the second generation (G3). G1 SES was expected to predict clear and responsive parental communication. Parental investments were expected to predict educational attainment and parenting for G2 and vocabulary development for G3. For the 139 families in the study, data were collected when G2 were adolescents and early adults and their oldest biological child (G3) was 3–4 years of age. The results demonstrate the importance of SES and parental investments for the development of children and adolescents across multiple generations.     

Perspectives on Sentiment Analysis

One of the consequences of the widespread use of social media is the equally widespread availability of all sorts of once intimate and private stuff: textual, visual, and affective. From this, a new form of labor arises: the mining of social media data. One type of social media data mining is sentiment analysis, the application of a range of technologies to determine sentiments expressed within social media about particular topics. This article maps out a range of emerging perspectives on sentiment analysis and argues that these sometimes-competing views need to be brought together, so that analyses of new socio-technical phenomena like sentiment analysis can be rich and rounded.     

Finding a third space in teacher education: creating an urban teacher residency

This paper describes an urban teacher residency program, the Newark Montclair Urban Teacher Residency, a collaborative endeavor between the Newark, New Jersey Public Schools and Montclair State University, built on a decades-long partnership. The authors see the conceptual work of developing this program as creating a “third space” in teacher education. We detail the ways in which we conceptualize epistemology and clinical practice in teacher education, and changes in the roles of the community, and P-12 teachers that occur in a third space. Providing an account of our messy and nonlinear process demonstrates the struggles of creating new spaces for teacher education. We believe the theory that informs our work, the challenges we face, and the strategies for meeting those challenges illustrate the tenuous and ever-evolving nature of doing work in the “third space.”     

Facilitating Self-Regulated Learning Skills and Achievement With a Strategic Content Learning Approach

Whether out of financial concerns for student retention or altruistic goals involving facilitating successful learning, efforts are being made to ensure college student success beyond chance independent study skills. Students often lack effective self-regulatory skills and study strategies necessary for success in college. With guidance through specific task-related learner activities, these skills may be enhanced. The current study investigated how student performance in an introductory psychology course at a midwestern community college might be impacted by a structured, content-learning approach engaging students in specific academic study skills activities. Results indicated that the intervention group performed significantly better across all three exam events and achieved higher semester course grades. Performance on the learning packet itself was positively correlated with exam performance.     

Secondary analysis of large-scale assessment data: an alternative to variable-centred analysis

International large-scale assessments are now part of the educational landscape in many countries and often feed into major policy decisions. Yet, such assessments also provide data sets for secondary analysis that can address key issues of concern to educators and policymakers alike. Traditionally, such secondary analyses have been based on a variable-centred approach that gives rise to league tables. In the study reported here, a person-centred analysis is used as an alternative to the traditional approach. Data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) were analysed to investigate Asian students' attitudes to their future civic participation. Cluster analysis with validity measures showed that 4 distinct groups of students were identified within the societies studied thus highlighting the diversity within the samples. These results cannot be achieved with a conventional variable approach to analysis, and they suggest the usefulness of exploring alternative approaches to secondary data analysis.